SEO

Let’s face it, we all would love for our sites to get more traffic. Spending lots of time to produce great content is important. But you should also promote your work, network with your peers, and make sure your website is optimized for search engines and social media. Here are 20 ways to drive more traffic to your WordPress site:

Make your site SEO friendly: this is a no brainer. You need to make sure your have your SEO basics right. Context may get more attention than keywords these days. But you should still have a title tag, proper URL structure, and an error free website to stay in Google’s good graces. Thankfully, there are plenty of SEO plugins that could help you with this part. [click to continue…]

Twitter Cards have been around for quite some time. They make it possible for you to attach media to tweets that link to your content. Here is how Twitter explains this feature:

Twitter cards make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your webpages, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a “card” added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.

Adding Twitter cards to your website is not that hard. Twitter provides plenty of documentation on how to do that. You could always use these plugins to get the job done faster:

Most SEOs would tell you that proper internal linking is very important towards helping you maximize your organic traffic. Besides, when you get people to visit your articles, you wouldn’t want them to leave too soon. By adding the appropriate internal links to each and every article, you will have an easier time keeping your audience on your site for longer. Many webmasters create their internal links manually. There is nothing wrong with that. These 3 plugins automatically add internal links to your WordPress site and save you time in the process:

SEO Smart Links: this awesome plugin can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts with the URLs you have defined. The premium version is even more powerful.

Most of us use WordPress themes or plugins to manage our SEO settings. Most WordPress webmasters rely on plugins such as All In One SEO, WordPress SEO, or Greg’s High Performance SEO to manage their title tags and other on-page SEO factors. Of course, if you are using a sophisticated theme framework such as Builder, Thesis, Headway, or Genesis, you already have everything you need to optimize your website for the search engines. But what if you decide to switch to another theme or platform? You shouldn’t have to enter your SEO data by hand. SEO Data Transporter is a handy plugin that makes transferring your SEO options from one theme/plugin to another easy.

Your post titles are perhaps the most important on-page ranking factor to Google and Bing. Getting a lot of links from other sites, writing killer content, and networking with others in your niche help a lot but without a decent set of title tags, you won’t get too far. While you don’t necessarily need a plugin to optimize your titles for the search engines, there are solutions out there that can make managing the process a whole lot easier. Here are 5 SEO title plugins that you don’t want to miss:

Creating a table of contents for your WordPress website can not only help the search engines find your pages and post more easily, it can also make life easier for your visitors as well. If you have just a couple of blog posts, you probably can do the job without needing a script. But that is not the most efficient way to do it for large sites. Table of Contents Creator lets you add a dynamic table of contents to your WordPress blog. Not only it can save you time organizing your existing blog posts, it also keeps track of the new ones.

Whether you are trying to optimize your website for the search engines or want to get your feet wet with paid advertising, you are going to need to focus on the right keywords. Sometimes it’s helpful to look at what others are doing in your field and learn from their positive strategies. That’s why spying tools are so handy. They give you all kinds of information on campaigns, keywords, and landing pages of your competitors and help you come up with some ideas of your own. With that said, here are 5 keyword spy tools that can help you take your business to the next level:

Compete: Compete is for power players. It gives you all kinds of information on your competitors and helps you optimize your own strategies. Whether you are looking for more keywords, want to increase your traffic, or find out what your competitors are doing right, Compete has you covered.

SEOmoz: not only has some of the best search engine optimization tips around, it has a set of tools that can help you find out more about your website (and more importantly your competitors’ websites).

SpyFu: the ultimate keyword spy tool for search engine and advertising professionals. Can dig up your competitors’ keywords and campaigns. Its Kombat tool lets you compare your website against those of your competitors’. [click to continue…]